The Stand (Original Edition) (124 page)

“Yes.”

The I-want line that Stu had first noticed in New Hampshire hours after meeting her now appeared on Fran’s forehead. “Will you get to the point, for heaven’s sake?”

“I’m trying, but I’m going to be careful,” George said. “This is your son’s life we’re discussing, and I’m not going to let you press me. I want you to understand the drift of our thinking. Captain Trips was a shifting-antigen flu, we think now. Now, every kind of flu—the old flu—had a different antigen; that’s why it kept coming back every two or three years or so in spite of flu vaccinations. There would be an outbreak of A-type flu, Hong Kong flu that was, and you’d get a vaccination for it, and then two years later a B-type strain would come along and you’d get sick unless you got a different vaccination.”

“But you’d get well again,” Dan broke in, “because eventually your body would produce its own antibodies. Your body changed to cope with the flu. With Captain Trips, the flu
itself
changed every time your body came to a defense posture. And it just went on shifting from form to form until the body was worn out. The result, inevitably, was death.”

“Then why didn’t we get it?” Stu asked.

George said: “We don’t know. I don’t think we’re ever going to know. The only thing we can be sure about is that the immunes didn’t get sick and then throw the sickness off; they never got sick at all. Which brings us to Peter again. Dan?”

“Yes. The key to Captain Trips is that people seemed to get
almost
better, but never
completely
better. Now this baby, Peter, got sick forty-eight hours after he was born. There was no doubt at all that it was Captain Trips—the symptoms were classic. But those discolorations under the line of the jaw, which both George and I had come to associate with the fourth and terminal stage of the superflu
—they never came.
On the other hand, his periods of remission have been getting longer and longer.”

“I don’t understand,” Fran said, bewildered. “What—”

“Every time the flu shifts, Peter is shifting right back at it,” George said. “There’s still the technical possibility that he might relapse, but ... he seems to be wearing it out.”

There was a moment of total silence.

Dan said, “You’ve passed on half an immunity to your child, Fran. He got it, but we think now he’s got the ability to lick it. We theorize that Mrs. Wentworth’s twins had the same chance, but with the odds stacked much more radically against them—and I still think that they may not have died of the superflu, but of complications arising from the superflu. That’s a very small distinction, I know, but it may be crucial.”

“And the other women who got pregnant by men who weren’t immune?” Stu asked.

“We think they’ll have to watch their babies go through the same painful struggle,” George said, “and some of the children may die— it was touch and go with Peter for a while, and may be again from all we know now. But very shortly we’re going to reach the point where all the fetuses in the Free Zone—in the
world
—are the product of two immune parents. And while it wouldn’t be fair to pre-guess, I’d be willing to lay money that when that happens, it’s going to be our ballgame. In the meantime, we’re going to be watching Peter very closely.”

“And we won’t be watching him alone, if that’s any added consolation,” Dan added. “In a very real sense, Peter belongs to the entire Free Zone right now.”

Fran whispered, “I only want him to live because he’s mine and I love him.” She looked at Stu. “And he’s my link with the old world. He looks more like Jess than me, and I’m glad. That seems right. Do you understand, Stu?”

Stu nodded, and a strange thought occurred to him—how much he would like to sit down with Hap and Norm Bruett and Vic Palfrey and have a beer with them and watch Vic make one of his shittysmelling home-rolled cigarettes, and tell them how all of this had come out. They had always called him Silent Stu; ole Stu, they said, wouldn’t say “shit” if he had a mouthful. But he would talk their ears off their heads. He would talk all night and all day. He grasped Fran’s hand blindly, feeling the sting of tears.

“We’ve got rounds to make,” George said, getting up, “but we’ll be monitoring Peter closely, Fran. You’ll know for sure when we know for sure.”

“When could I nurse him? If . . . If he doesn’t. . . ?”

“A week,” Dan said.

“But that’s so long!”

“It’s going to be long for all of us. We’ve got sixty-one pregnant women in the Zone, and nine of them conceived before the superflu. It’s going to be especially long for them. Stu? It was good meeting you.” Dan held out his hand and Stu shook it. He left quickly, a man with a necessary job to do and anxious to do it.

George shook Stu’s hand and said, “I’ll see you by tomorrow afternoon at the latest, hum? Just tell Laurie when would be the most convenient time for you."

“What for?”

“The leg,” George said. “It’s bad, isn’t it?”

“Not too bad.”

“Stu?” Frannie said, sitting up. “What’s wrong with your leg?” “Broken, badly set, overtaxed,” George said. “Nasty. But it can be fixed.”

“Well. . ” Stu said.

“Well, nothing! Let me see it, Stuart!” The I-want line was back. “Later,” Stu said.

George got up. “See Laurie, all right?”

“He will,” Frannie said.

Stu grinned. “I will. Boss lady says so.”

“It’s very good to have you back,” George said. A thousand questions seemed to stop just behind his lips. He shook his head slightly and then left, closing the door firmly behind him.

“Let me see you walk,” Frannie said. The I-want line still creased her brow.

“Hey, Frannie—”

“Come on, let me see you walk.”

He walked for her. It was a little like watching a sailor make his way across a pitching foredeck. When he turned back to her, she was crying.

“Oh, Frannie, don’t do that, honey.”

“I have to,” she said, and put her hands over her face.

He sat beside her and took her hands away. “No. No, you don’t.” She looked at
him
nakedly, her tears still flowing. “So many people dead . . . Harold, Nick, Susan . . . and what about Larry? What about Glen and Ralph?”

“I don’t know.”

“And what’s Lucy going to say? She’ll be here in an hour. She comes every day, and she’s six months pregnant herself. Stu, when she asks you . . .”

“They died over there,” Stu said, speaking more to himself than to her. “That’s what I think. What I know, in my heart.”

“Don’t say it that way,” Fran begged. “Not when Lucy gets here. It will break her heart if you do.”

“I think they were the sacrifice. God always asks for a sacrifice. His hands are bloody with it. Why? I can’t say. I’m not a very smart man. Praps we brought it on ourselves. All I know for sure is that the bomb went off over there instead of over here and we’re safe for a while. For a little while.”

“Is Flagg gone? Really gone?”

“I don’t know. I think . . . we’ll have to stand a watch for him. And in time, someone will have to find the place where they made the germs like Captain Trips and fill that place up with dirt and seed the ground with salt and then pray over it. Pray for all of us.”

Much later that evening, not long before midnight, Stu pushed her down the silent hospital corridor in a wheelchair. Laurie Constable walked with them, and Fran had seen to it that Stu had made his appointment.

“You look like you’re the one that should be in that wheelchair, Stu Redman,” Laurie said.

“Right now it doesn’t bother me at all,” Stu said.

They came to a large glass window that looked in on a room done in blues and pinks. A large mobile hung from the ceiling. Only one crib was occupied, in the front row.

Stu stared in, fascinated.

GOLDSMITH-REDMAN, PETER, the card at the foot of the crib read. BOY. B.W. 6 LB. 9 OZ. M. FRANCES GOLDSMITH, RM. 209 F. JESSIE RIDER (D.)

Peter was crying.

His small hands were balled into fists. His face was red. There was an amazing swatch of dark black hair on his head. His eyes were blue and they seemed to look directly into Stu’s eyes, as if accusing him of being the author of all his misery.

His forehead was creased with a deep vertical slash ... an I-want line.

Frannie was crying again.

“Frannie, what’s wrong?”

“All those empty cribs,” she said, and her voice became a sob. “That’s what’s wrong. He’s all alone in there. No wonder he’s crying, Stu, he’s all alone in there. All those empty cribs, my God—”

“He won’t be alone for so very long,” Stu said, and put an arm around her shoulders. “And he looks to me as if he’s going to bear up just fine. Don’t you think so, Laurie?”

But Laurie had left the two of them alone in front of the nursery window.

Wincing at the pain in his leg, Stu knelt beside Frannie and hugged her clumsily, and they looked in at Peter in mutual wonder, as if the child were the first that had ever been gotten upon the earth. After a bit Peter fell asleep, small hands clenched together on his chest, and still they watched
him
. . . and wondered that he should be there at all.

Mayday

They had finally put the winter behind them.

It had been long, and to Stu, with his East Texas background, it had seemed fantastically hard. Two days after his return to Boulder, his right leg had been rebroken and reset and this time encased in a heavy plaster cast that had not come off until early April. By then the cast had begun to look like some incredibly complex roadmap; it seemed that everyone in the Zone had autographed it, although that was a patent impossibility. The pilgrims had begun to trickle in again by the first of March, and by the day that had been the cut-off for income tax returns in the old world, the Free Zone was nearly eleven thousand strong, according to Sandy DuChiens, who now headed a Census Bureau of a dozen persons, a bureau that had its own computer terminal at the First Bank of Boulder.

Now he and Fran stood with Luey Swann in the picnic area halfway up Flagstaff Mountain and watched the Mayday Chase. All of the Zone’s children appeared to be involved (and not a few of the adults). The original maybasket, bedecked with crepe ribbons and filled with fruit and toys, had been hung on Tom Cullen. It had been Fran’s idea.

Tom had caught Bill Gehringer (despite Billy’s self-conscious disclaimer that he was too old for such kid games, he had joined in with a will), and together they had caught the Upshaw boy—or was it Upson? Stu had trouble keeping them all straight—and the three of them had tracked down Leo Rockway hiding behind Brentner Rock. Tom himself had put the tag on Leo.

The chase ranged back and forth over West Boulder, gangs of kids and adolescents surging up and down the streets that were still mostly empty, Tom bellowing and carrying his basket. And at last it had led back up here, where the sun was hot and the wind blew warm. The band of tagged children was some two hundred strong, and they were still in the process of tracking down the last half a dozen or so that were still “out.” In the process they were scaring up dozens of deer that wanted no part of the game.

Two miles further up, at Sunrise Amphitheater, a huge picnic lunch had been spread where Harold Lauder had once waited for just the right moment to speak into his walkie-talkie. At noon, two or three thousand people would sit down together and look east toward Denver and eat venison and deviled eggs and peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches, and fresh pie for dessert. It might be the last mass gathering the Zone would ever have, unless they all went down to Denver and got together in the stadium where the Broncos had once played football. Now, on Mayday, the trickle of early spring had swelled to a flood of immigrants. Since April 15 another eight thousand had come in, and they were now nineteen thousand or so —temporarily at least, Sandy’s Census Bureau could not keep up. A day when only five hundred came in was a rare day.

In the playpen which Stu had brought up and covered with a blanket, Peter began to cry lustily. Fran moved toward him, but Lucy, mountainous and eight months pregnant, was there first.

“I warn you,” Fran said. “It’s his diapers. I can tell just by the way he sounds.”

“Looking at a little poo isn’t going to cross my eyes.” Lucy lifted an indignantly crying Peter from the playpen and shook him gently back and forth in the sunlight. “Hi, baby. What you doing? Not too much?”

Peter blatted.

Lucy set
h
i
m
down on another blanket they had brought up for a changing table. Peter began to crawl away, still blatting. Lucy turned him over and began to unsnap his blue corduroy pants. Peter’s legs waved in the air.

“Why don’t you two go for a walk?” Lucy said. She smiled at Fran, but Stu thought the smile was sad.

“Why don’t we just do that?” Fran agreed, and took Stu’s arm.

Stu allowed himself to be walked away. They crossed the road and entered a mild green pasture that climbed upward at a steep angle under the moving white clouds and bright blue sky.

“What was that about?” Stu asked.

“Pardon me?” But Fran looked just a trifle too innocent.

“That look.”

“What look?”

“I know a look when I see one,” Stu said. “I may not know what it means, but I know it when I see it.”

“Sit down with me, Stu.”

“Like that, is it?”

They sat down and looked east where the land fell away in a series of swoops to flatlands that faded into a blue haze. Nebraska was out there in that haze somewhere.

“It’s serious. And I don’t know how to talk to you about it, Stuart.”

“Well, you just go on the best you can,” he said, and took her hand.

Instead of speaking, Fran’s face began to work. A tear spilled down her cheek and her mouth drew down, trembling.

“Fran—”

“No, I
won't
cry!” she said angrily, and then there were more tears, and she cried hard in spite of herself. Bewildered, Stu put an arm around her and waited.

When the worst of it seemed to be over, he said: “Now tell me. What’s this about?”

“I’m homesick, Stu. I want to go back to Maine.”